Top Digital Marketing Trends for 2018

Are you still practising the old internet marketing techniques? Well, if you are doing so, you should not expect much result out of them. The reason is that online marketing is a dynamic field. Every year, the digital marketing trends keep changing.

So, if you are wondering why your internet marketing strategies are not giving you the result, the reason could be that you are not following the latest trends. Unfortunately, several factors have plays an important role in moderating the trends of marketing. This article will help you understand these latest trends, so that you can create and implement the right strategy for your business.

Smartphones – Mobile Commerce

The growth of smartphones is something that the marketers have been targeting for a long time. As the smartphone market (mobile commerce) is rapidly booming, the marketers are focusing on mobile-first approach. On the other hand, people have started using mobile phones for all their online activities such as surfing, shopping, banking and much more. With a striking figure of 51.2 % of the total online traffic coming from mobile its important that eCommerce entrepreneurs need to find a feasible solution to integrate a mobile strategy. It’s a global rule to be where your customers are.

You must be wondering, smartphones have been in the market for quite a long time, then how are they a part of 2018 digital marketing trends. There are three main reasons that the smartphones are a trend in 2018.

• Google has announced the launch of a mobile-first algorithm
• The voice-based search is growing day-by-day
• Mobile-first websites will be the first point of contact for the consumers

Big Data To Segment a Wider Audience

Big data has changed the ways of customer interaction. The excessive amount of data available through the internet allows the businesses to identify the behaviour, tastes and preferences of the consumers. As a result, the businesses get to learn more about their customers, which indirectly improves the marketing efforts.

All these data are collected through various user activities such as social media participation, online transaction, mobile application download and much more.

The online marketers can make use of this big data to specifically target the required audience with minimal expenses. Most people started to embrace the benefits of digital transformation. As an eCommerce entrepreneur you need to realise the benefits it could bring. The availability of huge amount of data will help an eCommerce entrepreneur to tap into diverse segments and decide which marker segment he should stat with.

As a digital venture its important that you collect and place data in a structured manner. Every interaction that your customer have with your eCommerce store will help you get some data. Most of these data is kept in an unstructured manner. Periodically revisiting the data and structuring it will help get some crucial insights about the customer segment. To the least a systematically arranged 100 dots helps us to derive some pattern.

Personalization – Customised Experience

The response of personalization in 2017 was huge. This has increased the expectations of the consumers. Therefore, in 2018, the customer’s expect personalized online experience, especially from established brands.

The reason that the customers prefer personalization is to experience specific interests and preferences. As a result, it has shown more effectiveness when compared to general marketing. Moreover, it has shown increased click-through rates, open rates, conversions and much more.

If you haven’t thought of personalisation strategies, 2018 is the right time to step in. You will definitely experience the benefits of such a trend. A customised experience can always inspire a prospect to visit the virtual store, all most all the eCommerce stores are readily implement strategies like dynamic re-targeting and personalised drip campaigns to position their brand among customers. Most people tend to enter into a commerce when they are familiar with the business entity.

Technology has radically changed the way we perceive a brand. In a world that promises ubiquitous connectivity it is important to provide the customer with the best possible experience. To provide a spiffy customer experience the brand needs to get an in-depth knowledge about the customer base. People are inundated with almost all the promotional activities that are available online. So, its essential that what you do should discern your brand proportion from a regular campaign.

A simple example will be emails. With an increasing no” of spam emails hitting the inbox, the key differentiation will be how you customise and present your subject. People always love to hear from a business entity that cares for their customers.

Be intuitive, to draft a personalised experience we first need to understand the customer journey. Create a blueprint that allows you to monitor the visitors interactions, concerns (pain-points), etc. Map the customer journey. Once you have used your structured data to create a blueprint for the customer journey, then Ii allows you to map gaps in your process. Once you know where the customer stands in the customer journey then you will be able to create personalised marketing campaigns that fits the prospects position in the customer journey.

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Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is one of the biggest digital marketing trends of the year. You can achieve this through artificial intelligence and chatbots. One of the most successful examples is Starbucks. This popular coffee chain makes use of bots to help the customers with their order placement. Through the bots, every customer of Starbucks can know everything about their order status by voice or chat commands.

Therefore, through chatbots, the companies have started providing superior customer service. The major reason for selecting chatbots is that they help in delivering real-time information. Moreover, they are designed especially for customer service teams.

Many companies have started implementing chatbots but at a simpler level. However, in 2018, the companies would implement chatbots for their complex processes too.

Multi Touch Attribution

Think what wonders you could do, if only you could make your entity visible across multiple platforms. Caution to the word, when I say visible, it doesn’t reflect the idea of a mere presence. We are talking of crucial metrics live CTR (Click Through Rate) and interactions. Once you were able to create a fair presence across platforms, then you could reasonably allocate resources towards platforms that are tend to add more value to your business. May be one marking channel is giving you high CTR, but the revenue generation from the channel seems to be a bit low than that of another channel. See, now you are on to something. Why not invest more towards a channel that help generate higher revenue. It makes sense, isn’t it.

Note:- You need to consider the fact that its not a single interaction that contributed to the sale. The user would have visited your website through multiple channels prior to making a purchase decision. Due credit should be given to individual channels.

Video Advertising

The growth of video is exponential and clearly visible. According to a report, it was found that 90% of the content shared by the users in 2017 was video. With the scope of videos increasing rapidly, brands need to leverage the benefits of video-based advertising. They have to produce meaningful videos that can connect their company with the viewers.

One of the best examples of video-advertisement is YouTube. The number of YouTube users are growing day-by-day. To get the benefit out of this growth, many companies have started advertising on YouTube.

Therefore, 2018 is going to be a fruitful year for brands that have planned to invest in video-based marketing.

Suppose you are planning to start an online clothing business from home, I am pretty sure you will look into multipe ideas that could help promote your ecommere store. Why not try something new? In the product page instead of an image of the product add a video. Get a local model, make her try few of the latest fashion apparels available and then integrate in on the webpage. It gives the visitors an opportunity to see how the attire fits the personality, if you portray it right enough, then their exists a high change that your visitor will end up placing an order via your eCommerce store.

Cross Device Identification

Lets consider you want to buy a mobile, How do you go about it? Pretty sure you have a tight budget and tries to snatch the best deal out there. Most people carryout a through post purchase research. Come on, how many times have we done it. Comparing one mobile to 4 different. You do the same in your lunch breaks, when you are in your Pg, or even when you are travelling. Great! you want to get the best value for your investment. From a marketers perspective you just tries to reach out to a product from 3 different devices. The prospects customer’s journey is not linear, he jumps from one platform to another, take advices, suggestion and reviews form people and then makes a decision. Make sure that you have a cross device identification strategy set aside.

Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) have been the talk of the town for quite a few months. Marketers started considering these technologies especially after the success of AR in a mobile game called Pokémon Go.

L’Oreal, a cosmetics company, has already made use of virtual reality to provide a real-like service to its customers. The customers of L’Oreal can virtually apply make-up through virtual reality. This helps the customers understand the product without actually having to use it. Similarly, it also helps the company in the sense that they do not have to provide live product demo to their customers.

These technologies have a major role to play in digital marketing in 2018, as they provide fascinating user experiences. Moreover, they are going to serve as a differentiating factor for the brands.

Voice Optimized Content

As mentioned earlier, the voice-based searches are growing day-by-day. In 2017, it accounts for 20% of the total search. Therefore, in 2018, it is definitely expected to grow rapidly. Further, new devices such as Google’s Alexa have added to this growth. With the help of such devices, people find searching easier. Moreover, customers find such methods of searching more natural.

Therefore, it is essential that companies focus on optimizing their content according to voice commands. The reason is that voice searches are slightly different when compared to traditional search inputs.

Safety

With the growth of online transaction and processing, the cybercrime has also increased rapidly. There are several criminal activities involved, regarding identity theft, monetary theft and much more. Therefore, as people share their personal and bank details for various online activities, they prefer the safety of the same.

Hence, it is one of the biggest digital marketing trends that can affect an organization’s online growth. The more security a company provides to its online users, the more it will gain the benefits.

One of the basic things that every organization needs to do is implement an SSL certificate on their site. In the year 2018, the customers would look out for SSL certified websites only. If you are not one of them, you will stay on the losing end. Apart from securtiy, an SSL certificate also helps in increasing your website’s search result.

So, are you ready to face the 2018 audience? Well, if you implement these trends you need not worry about your online strategies. However, you need to ensure that you identify other trends that are specific to your business and implement them according to gain the best benefits.